228 MODERN CLASSIFICATION OF INSECTS. 



but the majority reside in thick woods and forests. They are also 

 occasionally found in timber yards, and in newly-built houses, having 

 made their escape from the wood of which the floors have been made, 

 and in which they have passed the larva state. A most remarkable 

 instance of this is recorded by Mr. Marsham, in the tenth volume of 

 the Lmncean Transactions, respecting the Bupr. splendens, which was 

 found alive whilst endeavouring to extricate itself from the wood of a 

 desk made of a plank imported from the Baltic, and which had stood 

 in one of the offices in the Guildhall of London upwards of twenty 

 years, and upon the surface being planed away, the track of the larva 

 was exposed. It is a curious subject for inquiry, in what state this 

 long period had been passed by the insect. 



In the first volume of the same Transactions, Mr. Dryander pub- 

 lished a notice of the ravages occasioned by an immature specimen of 

 the Bupr. canaliculata? which had eaten its way through a bale of 

 piece-goods received from Bengal, containing fifteen pieces of muslin, 

 of eight or ten folds in each, forming a passage about its own size. 



From information furnished by Latreille to Mr. Kirby it appears, 

 that the ocelli-like spots upon the elytra of the beautiful Bupr. ocellata, 

 a specimen of which was brought alive from China to the Isle of 

 France in wood, were observed by a friend of the former to be 

 luminous. Mr. Percheron has, however, recently published some 

 observations against this statement (^Rev. Entomol. v. 3.). 



Amongst the ancients^ the names of Buprestis, Vulpestris, Bul- 

 jiestris, Bustrepis, Bubestes, &c. were applied to a poisonous insect, 

 which was supposed to cause oxen to swell, inflame, and burst. 

 (" (^ovTrprjarig, irapu to irprjcrai rag /Sowe, quia boves rumpit) ; " and, in- 

 deed, so noxious was this insect considered that, by the Cornelian 

 law those who, with malice prepense, applied it in order to cause death, 

 were themselves condemned to die. GeofFroy, adopting an opinion of 

 MoufFet, considered it to be a species of ground-beetle (Carabus), to 

 which he accordingly applied the name of Buprestis ; but Latreille, 

 who published a memoir upon the subject in the nineteenth volume of 

 the Annales du Museum, regarded it as a species of Meloe, which 

 genus possesses equally strong vesicatory powers ; whilst Messrs. 

 Kirby and Spence, upon the authority of Belon, consider it to have 

 been a Mylabris ; and Mr. Hope (in Mr. Pettigrew's recent work 

 upon Mummies) has suggested that it was an CEstrus ; but as we 

 learn from Elian, Dioscorides, and Galen, that the Buprestis had all 



